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One of the world’s 7,000 languages vanishes every other week, and half – including scores of indigenous North American languages -- might not survive the 21st century, experts say. To preserve as much linguistic diversity as possible in the face of this threat, McGill University scientists are proposing to borrow a leaf from conservation biology.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that musical training helps people hear speech syllables in loud environments, and has shown how this happens. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers Yi Du and Robert Zatorre monitored brain function as musicians and non-musicians listened to speech fragments and varying background noise levels.

A clinical trial almost ten years in the making has revealed that risky, but powerful, clot busting drugs and medical devices do not improve outcomes for patients experiencing deep vein thrombosis (DVT), nor do they prevent the development of post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS) when compared with conventional blood thinning medications....

For the past ten years, the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors at McGill University and the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) in Washington, D.C. have come together for the annual Holiday Lottery Campaign, a corporate social responsibility program designed to help lotteries make adults aware of the risks of giving lottery products as holiday gifts to minors.

Fatty liver is among the most frequent causes of liver disease in Canada and in Western countries and is one of the main indications for liver transplant. For some time, researchers have suspected that people living with HIV could be at higher risk of developing liver disease, which, as a result of longer life expectancy thanks to antiretroviral therapy, has become the major cause of their mortality in North America....

Professor Palmer is one of the few researchers to receive two CREATE training grants to date. From 2009-2015, Professor Palmer led an NSERC funded CREATE program in auditory cognitive neuroscience, training over 180 students and postdoctoral fellows. Her significant findings from that program informed her training program application in Complex Dynamics.

New research by McGill University biologists shows that milder winters have led to physical alterations in two species of mice in southern Quebec in the past 50 years – providing a textbook example of the consequences of climate change for small mammals.

The findings also reveal a stark reversal in the proportions of the two mice populations present in the area, adding to evidence that warming temperatures are driving wildlife north.

Do songbirds and humans have common biological hardwiring that shapes how they produce and perceive sounds?

Scientists who study birdsong have been intrigued for some time by the possibility that human speech and music may be rooted in biological processes shared across a variety of animals. Now, research by McGill University biologists provides new evidence to support this idea.

Montreal, with its multilingual, multiethnic population, is an ideal living laboratory for researchers and students from the city’s four universities and many specialized research centres. How can Montreal be designed to better accommodate the needs of its children? What measures need to be put in place to accommodate people of different cultures and religions living in close proximity? How is the city’s nighttime economy different from that of the daytime and what are the implications?

The international Cundill History Prize today announced the British historian Daniel Beer as the 2017 winner of the US$75,000 prize – the richest in non-fiction for a single work in English. The London-based historian was awarded for his ground-breaking study of Siberian penal colonies, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (Allen Lane)